Ocrolus Software Review

A few years ago, I reviewed data analysis software sold by Ocrolus called PerfectAudit. The software captures data, analyzes the data, and assists with fraud detection

Recently the company abandoned the Perfect Audit brand, and now just calls the product Ocrolus. The old website www.perfectaudit.com forwards to the Ocrolus website. PerfectAudit as a brand has essentially been scrubbed from the internet. This might correspond with a recent round of venture capital that was raised.

My unfavorable review of Ocrolus was met with requests from company representatives to remove it from my site. They were disappointed that my review of the Ocrolus software ranked well in Google searches.

Some improvements have been made to the Ocrolus investigative software, but some of my concerns are still valid. Have a look at my PerfectAudit software review if you want all the details, but here’s a summary of the concerns I still have:

The accuracy guarantee wasn’t even close. They used a 100% accuracy guarantee at the time I tested the product. They later started saying over 99% accurate. The test I did with them wasn’t even close. Transactions were duplicated. Transactions were missing. The process used to extract transactions from statements hasn’t changed since I tested the product, so I’m not confident in their accuracy claims.

Ocrolus uses an OCR (optical character recognition) engine to extract data from PDFs. If the PDF quality is such that the OCR engine cannot accurately get the data, someone has to look at the bank statements and enter the data into the database by hand. This is done through crowdsourcing overseas. In other words, there are people overseas who are looking at the statements and doing the data entry. The quality control during my test was non-existent, and I also had concerns about the security and confidentiality of my data.

Data that was entered by hand was not done in a consistent manner. Abbreviations were used and important transaction data was not entered. Unless data entry clerks are instructed to type all data as it shown on the face of the statements, this will be a never-ending problem.

Reconciling the data was difficult with the interface provided. I haven’t received word on whether this has been improved.

Buyer beware. Take their free test drive (if you trust the security of your client’s financial data) and carefully evaluate the quality control and the results you get.